Vietnam

this weekend i went to ho chi minh city with my friend grace. its a 6 hour bus ride from phnom penh but it was surprisingly quick and painless - and very cheap. we arrived on thursday afternoon, found a guest house, and headed out to wander around the city. the first place we went was the central marketplace. its huge but a lot like the markets in pp. slightly cleaner. we bought some fruit to have with wine on the balcony of our guesthouse, and continued wandering. after 3 hours of roaming around we headed back to the guesthouse and had bread and cheese (which is sold on the street for 25 cents) with fruit for dinner. we were staying in the backpacker neighbourhood so after dinner we went out and played pool with other travelers.

on friday we did all the main tourist sights in ho chi minh. first was the fine arts museum, which is in a striking old colonial mansion. it was surprising how unsupervised it was, we just walked in... roamed around.. and left. no one seemed to be in charge of the place at all. next we went to the war remnants museum, which was just horrific. some of the most disturbing pictures i have ever seem. especially the pictures of victims of the chemical weapons during the vietnam war. there was also photos of groups of civilians (women and children) looking absolutely terrified, and the caption under the photo would read something like: as soon as i walked away from taking this picture the soldiers opened fire. i heard screams and bodies falling but i didnt look back. after the war museum we stopped and had pho - a famous vietnamese noodle soup. it was delicious. after lunch we walked to the nicer, ritzy part of ho chi minh and checked out the malls and upscale hotels.

aside from the rich area (which was small) ho chi minh seemed like a bigger, slightly cleaner, more chaotic version of phnom penh. the traffic and lack of road rules is much worse - to the point where it is sometimes impossible to cross the street, and the city itself is many times bigger, but the general look of it was not that different.

after our day of touring around we went to dinner at a jazz bar called Sax n Art, relaxed and listening to live jazz. very nice place.

saturday we signed up to do a one day tour of the mekong delta. the tour started at 8am with a bus trip 2 hours to a village called mythos. there we got on a bus and toured around a few islands, saw local villagers making coconut candy (which is delicious), had lunch, listened to traditional vietnamese music, and took a ride on row boats through the narrow canals of the delta. it was a totally new landscape - something i had never seen before. its just all water really... the foliage is dense and huts and small homes just appear our of nowhere barely visible through the trees. the people travel by boat along canals that are lined with tall grasses/trees.

saturday night we went out for sushi dinner - sushi is not popular and probably not a smart idea in pp so it was great to eat it again. then we went to an expat bar and hung out with a large group of german people who were having a private party that they nicely included us in. sunday morning we got back on the bus and headed home. overall it was a great trip. i plan on going back to vietnam in august - to the northern part to see hanoi, and i cant wait...

random

for the last couple of weeks i have been in phnom penh working and hanging out with the other interns. i definitely know the city pretty well now. there are some great restaurants, used book stores and shops which make it feel fairly quaint and friendly. but there is still an edge to it. and no mcdonalds:) did some tourist things last weekend - went to the killing fields, which is an area outside pp where the khmer rouge executed thousands of people and buried them in mass graves. it was pretty disturbing/horrific/incomprehensible. about half of the graves still have not been excavated.

on a lighter note, last saturday i went to my first khmer hip hop show. it was surreal. it was in a dive bar/club that they charged $2 admission to get into (first time ive ever paid cover in cambodia, and likely the last). they took songs like sexyback and changed the words to khmer. and yelled "khmer" a lot (except they pronounce it "khmai"). and the only beer they were serving was budweiser.

on sunday a group of us went to the phnom penh hotel and paid $5 to spend the day swimming. it started to pour rain about an hour after we got there and we decided to wait it out and ended up in the pool in torrential rain for two hours. it got really cold but they were going to charge us another $8 each to go into the hottub so we were stuck.

otherwise work has been good. we are starting to wrap thing up a little bit but everything takes longer than you think it will and there are a lot of editing things that need to get finished. some of the interns are leaving as early as next week.

update

not too much has been going on, i was sick for the week after i got back from kep and didnt really get out of bed. since then i have been catching up on work, we just finished our rough draft of our children's rights manual. im doing a lot of reading - am trying to read a bunch of kurt vonnegut books (so far: breakfast of champions, cats cradle, mother night and player piano), and also tom robbins books. am currently distracted by the poisonwood bible though. all of which has nothing to do with cambodia.

phnom penh is feeling like home now, as much as it still gets exhausting to be constantly harassed by moto drivers... "moto" "moto" "moto"... its a constant chorus as i walk down the street. just the general staring is still off-putting. saw a kid on the back of a moto attached to an IV which was interesting. its raining almost every day now, on and off, but its much cooler which i like.

we had a guest speaker last week who works with the defense support section of the united nations assistance to the khmer rouge tribunals. it was very interesting, definitely the kind of work that i would like to get involved in - but as the guest speaker said - international criminal law is very in and glamorous right now in the legal world so its hard to get into.

went out on canada day and sang karaoke. cambodians love karaoke. for some reason we were hanging out with a cambodian movie star and he was very into it. every other song was khmer pop music. having a bbq tomorrow for july 4th. otherwise the office is quiet this week because the other half of the interns is in Kep doing what we were doing two weeks ago.